Thomas Merton's Japanese Preface to Thoughts in Solitude

The Japanese translation of Thomas Merton's Thoughts in Solitude
included an original preface (to be translated into Japanese). The
new preface was composed in order to reflect the
cultural and spiritual affinities of Japanese readers. This preface
stands alone as an essay on solitude.

Thoughts in
Solitude, assembled in 1953-54, is not the representative work that Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude
is. More popular in tone, this short book is in two parts: "Aspects
of the Spiritual Life" and "The Love of Solitude." The
book is comprised of
reflections on various religious and even devotional
topics. The preface to the Japanese edition addresses solitude in a context recognizable
in Japan, making a gradual transition to the affirmation of
Christianity, but a very ecumenical and open one.

Merton acknowledges the legitimate differences in Japanese
thought that make such a new preface worthwhile because the book as
a whole is.

I felt that many Japanese readers, still
open to their more contemplative heritage, would recognize something
familiar to them in these intuitive, provisional, and deliberately
incomplete suggestions.

The Ground of Solitude

Merton plunges into this frame of mind from the first sentence of
the preface, stating that nothing can be said of solitude and
meditation that "has not been said better by the wind in the pine
trees." From this point onwards, we know that he is leaving the
vocabulary and imagery of Western thinking behind him. The purpose
of the essay, he tells us, is to echo the sound of that wind, to
capture what is heard. But who hears it? Who hears silence? Yet the
deep silence must be heard before solitude can be discussed.

Merton confesses that his Thoughts in Solitude does not attempt to
convince or presume of readers anything. It invites the reader to do
this listening with him, to remind the reader to become a "Hearer."
He asks the traditionally-phrased philosophical question: Who is the
Hearer? The Hearer must be a No-Hearer in
order to hear silence. Merton points to the reality that only
Hearing transpires. "The proper climate for such Hearing is
solitude."

Merton has assumed that the essential philosophical framework of his
Japanese reader will be Zen Buddhism, with which he had some
familiarity even from his Columbia University days via D. T. Suzuki.
And the question of who is the hearer hearkens back to the Witness of
Hinduism as well. Merton has established a comfortable harmony with
his readers.

The focus on solitude then begins:

If you imagine the solitary as "one" who has numerically isolated
himself from "many others," who has simply gone out of the crowd to
hang up his individual number on a rock in the desert, and there to
receive messages denied to the many, you have a false and demonic
solitude.

This is the false solitude properly labeled "individualism" or
even "egoism" -- though Merton uses neither term. It is the mistaken
view of eremitism as a mere dropping out of society. It insists on asserting
the person's identity and persona as the "self" with a lower-case
"s." But,

The true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself. ...
There is One solitude in which all persons are at once together and
alone.

The error of modern social thought is to quantify individuals,
which reduces them to nothing. It thus alienates the individual,
substituting individuality rather than asserting personhood. In
Merton's scheme, the ground of each of us unites each of us: "He is
truly alone who is wide open to heaven and earth and closed to
no one."

For the Catholic Merton, this ground is God, this unity of all
selves is Love.

The paradox of solitude is that its true ground is universal love
-- and true solitude is the undivided unity of love. ...

Thus, no person enters solitude alone, or entertains it alone.
As he says above, "There is One Solitude in which all persons are at once together and
alone." This realization confutes the nature of modern society,
which fosters alienation from self and others, replacing unity with
artificial constructs, ideologues, technologies and material
possessions.

Hence, we live in a world in which we say, "God is dead," and do
so in a sense rightly, since we are no longer capable of
experiencing the truth that we are completely rooted and grounded in
His Love.

The Recovery of Solitude

How to seek and recover this truth, and hence restore society? Merton
answers by borrowing an Asiatic structure to his response: Do not
seek it, for by recognizing it, we already have it. Instead,
enter solitude to discover and enhance the realization of God. The
answer is not found in "collective agitation." Nor is it found in
philosophical discourse or religious dogmas. In short,

The answer is not found in words, but by living on a certain
level of consciousness. These pages are, then, a landscape of the
mind, a level of consciousness: the peace, the silence of aloneness
in which the Hearer listens, and the Hearing is No-Hearing.

At this point, Merton attempts to present Christianity as a
religion of the Word, as Love preceded by and emerging from silence.
The speech of God is the Word, but being Love it is silent, it says
nothing separate from God and draws meaning only as Love. Merton
argues that whatever "documents" or "complex doctrines"
may tell us
about God, they are inadequate as long as they are not grasped as a
whole, a unity. Merton goes so far as to say that individual
glimpses of God must "converge upon Love as the spokes of a wheel
converge upon a central hub" -- an image made famous in the West by Nicholaus of
Flue but certainly the primary image of Buddhism, too. And Merton's
theology is phrased in a way that Japanese readers can appreciate:

Where is silence? Where is solitude? Where is Love? Ultimately,
these cannot be found anywhere except in the ground of our own
being. There, in the silent depths, there is no more distinction
between the I and the Not-I. There is redemptive Love. There we
encounter God ...

Our actions should come out of this encounter, from the
experience of solitude, silence, divine love -- and not the other
way around, not stimulated to action by the world or society or by
others. Merton laments that the "spiritual and mental sickness of
the West is attacking and undermining the East with its violence and
activism." This fact was clear to all Asian thinkers, but Merton
wants them to know that he understands and identifies with their plight.

The fruit of a truly spiritual life "emerges from this
dissolution of our ego in the ground of being and of Love." This
dissolution is not an irrational and inhuman act because it accepts
and is enfolded into the "wholeness and completeness of everything
in God's love." This dissolution is an emptying that corresponds to
the emptying that Japanese philosophical tradition comprehends.

It is not difficult for Merton to show how modern thought is
inimical to both eastern and Christian (as Merton presents it)
thinking:

Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is
aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his
action produces obvious results. ... Their desire is only an
illusion which cannot find fulfillment.

Social action under the guise of togetherness is not grounded in
truth. It is bound to overwhelm individuals with a false sense of
community. It is to people our lives "with devils disguised as
angels of light." The only solution is solitude, a solitude that
allows the ego to diminish and allows the universal self and its
love, simplicity, and compassion, to emerge.

Conclusion

This preface to Japanese readers was certainly comprehendible to
Western readers, especially in light of Merton's posthumous
publications and the growth of Western appreciation of Eastern
thought. It stands alone as a useful summary of Merton's thoughts on
solitude.

¶

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

The Japanese preface to Thoughts in Solitude has been reproduced as "Love and Solitude" in
Love and Living, edited by Naomi Burton Stone & Patrick Hart. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979;
in Introductions East and West: The Foreign Prefaces of Thomas Merton, edited by
Robert E. Daggy. Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 1981, and in Honorable Reader:
Reflections on My Work; edited by Robert E. Daggy. New York: Crossroad, 1989.